LEXINGTON, KY - What if you could do something meaningful for people in your community who are in real need and at the same time market your business in that visceral way that brings potential customers into intimate contact with your product line?
A Lexington potter and a local restauranteur with a shared sense of social responsibility are pooling their resources to call attention to the hunger gnawing at a particular segment of the homebound of central Kentucky. Mudworks and Bourbon & Toulouse have teamed up in support of an "Empty Bowls" anti-hunger event on Saturday, August 29. For a minimum contribution of $10, you pick out a handmade ceramic bowl from among those being made at Mudworks and contributed by other studios around the state and fill it with a Cajun meal.
In fact, there will be an opportunity from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.on Tuesday, August 11 to actually explore the fashioning of pottery and craft one of those bowls. Mudworks will host a "Bowl-a-thon," a time when anybody can stop by the National Avenue studio and fashion a ceramic vessel that will play a key role in the August 29th event at the Euclid Avenue restaurant.
"One of our vendors shipped us almost a ton of the wrong kind of clay and told us to just keep it. So we're donating that clay to Empty Bowls," explained Mudworks owner Link Henderson. "We hope to make 600-700 bowls."
Bourbon & Toulouse will donate all of the food for the event. "We wanted to make it easy and we want to provide a variety so on that day whatever our menu choices are -we usually offer 13 but they vary a little from day to day- a person comes in, buys a bowl and we fill it with whatever they want from the menu," said co-owner Will Pieratt.
"This is all on us," he added. "(Co-owner) Kevin (Heathcoat) and I are part of this community and from the beginning we wanted to be involved, particularly with charitable events like this." Pieratt said he's also aware that by hosting such an event he can generate positive word-of-mouth buzz about his business.
So, how will it work when bowl meets Jambalaya? "Just show up any time for the lunch or dinner hours," Henderson explained. "There's a $10 minimum donation for a bowl. You can pick out the bowl that you want. We'll have a tent set up out back and as many of the bowls as we can layout will be on display. You can just walk through and choose the one that you like. And then you can order a scoop of anything off their menu."
All proceeds after costs from the Aug.,29 event go to Moveable Feast, a tax exempt nonprofit that prepares and delivers hot meals to homebound residents of the Lexington/Fayette county area who are living with AIDS and HIV-related illnesses. The organization also serves patients of Hospice of the Bluegrass. Those overhead costs include a poster to promote the event and, explained Henderson, "We're reimbursing Bourbon & Toulouse for paper bowl inserts. Because we thought about having 600 people touching every bowl and you might not want to eat out of that. So we got a little liner bowl."
Empty Bowls is a North Carolina-based grassroots movement with a mission "to raise money to help organizations fight hunger, to raise awareness about the issues of hunger and food security, and to help bring about an attitude that will not allow hunger to exist," according to its Web site.